Folks in our Crescent Hill neighborhood have been watching with considerable anticipation as a crew associated with Louisville’s Bluegrass Brewing Co. sped through a major “gut rehab” of the old Darkstar tavern, converting what had been frankly a rather grim saloon into an airy, inviting temple to all things local beer and food.
Continue reading Craft House packing them in on Frankfort
Category Archives: QuickBytes
Short, conversational mini-reviews that report on new sightings, updates on previously reviewed restaurants or other restaurant reports that may not fit the full-scale review format.
Feeling offal? Check out your local taqueria
Menudo, the fabulously strong flavored and fiery Mexican stew made from pork chitlins (“chitterlings,” to the prissy, or, if you insist on a definition in English, pork intestines) is one of the world’s most trusted hangover cures.
This may relate to the truth that, no matter how bad you feel, if you can hold down a stenchy ration of menudo, you can probably hold down just about anything.
Continue reading Feeling offal? Check out your local taqueria
We Get Our Deli on at Stevens & Stevens
Mary took a bite of her sandwich – no easy task considering its oversize girth. She chewed gently, looked thoughtful, then firmly opined: “This is almost too much meat.”
Yes, this is one of those things that no one said, ever … until someone said it.
And it betrayed a basic failure to comprehend the simple reality of delicatessen tradition: “Too much meat,” meaning “generously, gloriously piled high,” is just what delis do.
Continue reading We Get Our Deli on at Stevens & Stevens
Eggs Over Frankfort Rings Diner-Style Breakfast Bell
Frankfort Avenue – or just plain “The Avenue,” as its neighborhood business association likes to call it – has come a mighty long way in the generation since the late, lamented Deitrich’s started serving creative cuisine in an upscale environment in the old Crescent Theater, a place that at the time had seen considerably better days.
Continue reading Eggs Over Frankfort Rings Diner-Style Breakfast Bell
Red Checks and Brooklyn Pie at Old School NY Pizza
Has Louisville reached the saturation point for pizza? Some of my foodie friends are aghast at the seemingly endless march of pizzerias that keep arriving in town. The Baxter Avenue/Bardstown Road and St. Matthews strips are particularly pizza-rich environments, but they’re everywhere – even, in today’s excursion, the far East End. Continue reading Red Checks and Brooklyn Pie at Old School NY Pizza
Celebrate the Noble Noodle at Thai Noodles
Life as a hunter-gatherer was hard, no question about that. As the philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously put it, this life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
But at least paleolithic humans didn’t have to make many decisions at supper time. Knock over an animal, whack off a chunk and chow down. Cooking it was optional, once people learned to tame fire. It was only when humans settled down in agricultural societies about 10,000 years ago that culinary life got complicated. Continue reading Celebrate the Noble Noodle at Thai Noodles
Cottage Cafe Shines on Middletown’s Old Main Street
Middletown’s Main Street, a quaint strip of Victorian houses, steepled churches and storefront shops, served as the suburban community’s main drag for many years as its commercial center and a slow-down, look-around opportunity for traffic on the old U.S. 60.
Then came the age of the suburb. Middletown got a four-lane “bypass” that sped traffic around the old town center and that quickly sprouted with shopping centers and strip malls, and Main Street settled into a quieter, gentler place. Continue reading Cottage Cafe Shines on Middletown’s Old Main Street
The ‘ritas are the wildest thing at Wild Rita’s
So, just how wild are the ‘ritas at Wild Rita’s?
Well, this new spot just east of downtown, within the noise penumbra and particulates shadow of the Great Bridge Boondoggle, offers 10, count ’em 10, variations on the margarita, not to mention tequila cocktails, tequila tastings and nearly 100 fine tequilas by the bottle or drink. It would take more effort than I’m willing to expend to answer this question definitively. Continue reading The ‘ritas are the wildest thing at Wild Rita’s
Comfy Cow growing into a herd
“I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream.” Once a popular ditty of the “Roaring Twenties,” this folk wisdom has grown into a simple truth.
Who doesn’t like ice cream? As Mary’s father used to say, even after an ample meal, “There is always room for ice cream.” And with Spring belatedly breaking after one of the most relentless Winters in recent memory, the signs of the season include, in addition to green buds, bright flowers and insane allergy-pollen levels, long lines of hungry supplicants forming around just about every ice-cream shop in town. Even the perennial ice cream trucks have brought their clangy rendition of “Camptown Races” back to the streets of our fair city. Continue reading Comfy Cow growing into a herd
Hay!! Chi Wa Waa! Where in the heck is Chapinlandia?
Hay!! Chi Wa Waa!? Chapinlandia? What the heck is going on here? Did someone just yell, “Alex, I’ll take ‘Restaurants with Unusual Names’ for $500”? Nah.
Continue reading Hay!! Chi Wa Waa! Where in the heck is Chapinlandia?